Comment by hericium
5 years ago
> Email is another clusterfuck of a protocol (well, several protocols) that barely functions despite dozens of modern pseudo-standards plastered over it. I’ve written extensively about that too.
SMTP is one of last of decentralized open communication protocols that is still widely used by business. It evolved over time, gained some additions and stayed alive. The biggest issue I have with e-mail nowadays is companies like Microsoft and Google acting like they go out of their way to break protocols and deliver less and less messages from perfectly well working but decentralized sources.
Microsoft is especially bad of the two, with years-long tradition of acting against standards (Outlook Express connecting to recipients' MX, cloud offering accepting messages for delivery and never delivering them [1] etc). Google, I believe, as soon as they find a better way to get hold on user's invoices and receipts, will teach their users that they should use something else instead.
Stating that standard barely functions just because anti-privacy corporations only pretend to use standards in way there were intended, but concentrate on breaking them, is not how I would describe current state of e-mail-related stuff.
The "decentralization" of SMTP comes from the high level architecture of store-and-forward. It has very little to do with the protocol, which could be expressed more effectively and cleanly on HTTP2 or HTTP3 (it won't be, but should) without risking any of its "openness".
Decentralization was not a quest when those protocols were created. It pretty much became "a thing" with blockchains. It previously... just "was".
It started "not being anymore" with corporations - and once again I bow before Microsoft and Google - using less and less lube over time when telling their own clients what their role is at the ecosystem.
I will absolutely fight any attempt at calling e-mail protocols broken just because a corporations can't figure out their revenue around it.
You’re conflating a number of issues. We are strictly talking about technical specifications. Not about who owns what nor even arguing that everything should be centralised. In fact it is technically possible to create a better alternative to SMTP while still satisfying all of the non-technical requirements you’ve outlined too. You could even drop feed that new protocol into existence the same way we’ve seen IPv6 creep in parallel to IPv4, albeit it would probably take 20 years to do so.
And this isn’t even touching on the problems with IMAP and the insanity that POP3 is even still a thing.
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Email protocols are broken because they are bad 1990s protocols that haven't benefited from 20 years of systems learning about building protocols. I don't much care who does or doesn't have a hard time monetizing them.
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